@ZeroEmpires has always wanted to have sort of leagues or recurrent tournaments. I remember the first time I started watching AoE (2014 maybe?) he was organizing a tournament (I don't remember the name) where there were two leagues (Gold and Silver), every player had to play each other and for future editions best players from Silver would promote and so on. There were no future editions because the torunament was a bit of a failure. Not at all for the top players (I clearly remember watching the finals, it was there were I discovered Membrillo) but for the medium to low players, that once they saw they had no chances, they failed to schedule and lost motivation).
This is something that happens a lot with long events or Leagues: as the best matches are not always in the end, people loose hype and interest. Something similar happened during ECL: there was a lot of emotion at the beginning and near the end, where it could be decisive, but in the middle....
All of the above are arguments against organizing league tournaments, but I see signs that things have changed:
- There are more and more players that make a living out of AoE2, this is not summer 2014 and normally pros don't fail to schedule, they are "regular" enough for a league
- Since DE got playable, we see showmatches so often (2-3 per week, at the same time as tournaments) and if there are enough viewers for those, "unimportant" matches, why would people miss a match for being number 7 in Age of Empires, providing open casting?
Thing may have changed or not, but some of you will wonder what is the point of having such leagues, so I have some benefits:
- Regular content, easy to follow. (good for streamers)
- Help new viewers familiarise with the best players: I started to know who the best players were with Zak's event: Viper, RiuT, TaToH, slam, Chris, FeAge... Silly me that I though that it was a regular event done every few months so the ones in the Gold League had proven to be there and the first 3 in the Silver league would be there as well.
- Round Robin tournaments are the fairest of all as everyone faces everybody. People complain now about how we don't have a consistent way to seed/qualify for the tournaments, League Performance could be used in that way, providing it was really a regular thing.
- At last we can see some match-ups that we rarely see!
- It could be organised more easily that what it sounds. Imagine each league consists of 8 players (then it's easier to seed people in tournaments!). Each player needs to play 2 matches per week (not too much given what they play now) so that we finish a League every month, and matches could be Bo3 Arabia +2 HM, nothing crazy. (maybe change a bit in special months, for events). If we had 3 divisions (Gold + Silver + Bronze) it's already 24 players and if there are more people wishing to participate there could be a chocolate league as qualifyer.
This is something that happens a lot with long events or Leagues: as the best matches are not always in the end, people loose hype and interest. Something similar happened during ECL: there was a lot of emotion at the beginning and near the end, where it could be decisive, but in the middle....
All of the above are arguments against organizing league tournaments, but I see signs that things have changed:
- There are more and more players that make a living out of AoE2, this is not summer 2014 and normally pros don't fail to schedule, they are "regular" enough for a league
- Since DE got playable, we see showmatches so often (2-3 per week, at the same time as tournaments) and if there are enough viewers for those, "unimportant" matches, why would people miss a match for being number 7 in Age of Empires, providing open casting?
Thing may have changed or not, but some of you will wonder what is the point of having such leagues, so I have some benefits:
- Regular content, easy to follow. (good for streamers)
- Help new viewers familiarise with the best players: I started to know who the best players were with Zak's event: Viper, RiuT, TaToH, slam, Chris, FeAge... Silly me that I though that it was a regular event done every few months so the ones in the Gold League had proven to be there and the first 3 in the Silver league would be there as well.
- Round Robin tournaments are the fairest of all as everyone faces everybody. People complain now about how we don't have a consistent way to seed/qualify for the tournaments, League Performance could be used in that way, providing it was really a regular thing.
- At last we can see some match-ups that we rarely see!
- It could be organised more easily that what it sounds. Imagine each league consists of 8 players (then it's easier to seed people in tournaments!). Each player needs to play 2 matches per week (not too much given what they play now) so that we finish a League every month, and matches could be Bo3 Arabia +2 HM, nothing crazy. (maybe change a bit in special months, for events). If we had 3 divisions (Gold + Silver + Bronze) it's already 24 players and if there are more people wishing to participate there could be a chocolate league as qualifyer.